


Time (to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet)

by herbaceous_boarder



Series: Breeding Lilacs Out of the Dead Land (Stirring Dull Roots with Spring Rain) [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: 'cause she's amazing and I want to know her, Cosima is only in this on a piece of paper, Delphine arrives at her placement, F/F, First oneshot of a series, I'm pretentious that way, also I stick poetic epigraphs on everything, basically me trying to get a grip on delphine's character, just before she meets cosima, sorry about that, sorrynotsorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 14:39:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6614563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbaceous_boarder/pseuds/herbaceous_boarder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Beraud” she mumbled to herself, testing out her assigned new name. She didn’t much like it and had no doubt she’d have a hard time remembering to answer to it. She’d gotten pretty good at lying over the years but this was a whole new level of deception, an entire new persona between her and the world, keeping Delphine Cormier that little bit further out of reach.</p><p>Just what she needed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time (to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet)

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of a set up one-shot exploring Delphine's psychology a little bit just a few days before she meets Cosima in person. I'm planning a series just kind of exploring Delphine's interior and backstory more, 'cause that's what really intrigues me on the show more than anything, I think.

 

 _“Because years came and went, and more and more_  
_Brought new lies with them to be loved in turn”_

  
\- _The Ring and the Book_ , Robert Browning

 

 

Delphine settled the box she had been carrying on the dull metallic gleam of the kitchen worktop, picking up instead the welcome pack that had been left for her there. Flicking it open she glanced over the usual mix of legalese in the tenancy agreement she was expected to sign, inane advert-speak in the pamphlet on student opportunities (which hastened to assure her repeatedly that she had made the right choice in coming to the University of Minnesota) and terrible puns in the student-penned “Freshers’ Guide”.

With a wry smile she carefully fingered the cheery fridge magnet included and placed it, a little reluctantly, on her new sleek black fridge, reading back the legend “I <3 Minnesota Uni” with a slight pang. She was reasonably sure that Aldous would have gotten quite the chuckle when he saw that. Assuming, of course, that he’d left the welcome pack for her himself, which she guessed he probably hadn’t. This cheered her in an odd way. Perhaps if she didn’t let him into her apartment this time, if she kept to meeting him in neutral spaces, he never would see it and she would have this small victory over him. A token of her slightly humiliating placement in plain sight and yet out of his.

She rested on the bar-stool placed at the counter-top and puffed, dislodging the strands of curly ringlets that had fallen into her face. She tapped her fingers on the stool beneath her legs and looked around, simultaneously over and under whelmed.

It was a gorgeous apartment for a doctoral student, she knew, having been one for real just a couple of short years ago. She had a lounge area replete with a soft cream suite set around an imitation fire, above which was set a wide-screen television; an office-space behind her with a desk positioned under the window and a large bookshelf to its side waiting to be stacked; a large double-room complete with an en suite bathroom and, of course, the reasonably sized and expensively-equipped kitchen in which she was currently sat.

  
Dyad certainly did not scrimp on its employee benefits. Probably wise. Unhappy employees able to hand over enough illegal information to put the company in serious jeopardy are not an ideal business asset.

They must have managed to pull some strings to get her a tutor’s apartment – she’d certainly never seen such a luxurious student apartment in her few experiences of universities. The monochrome colour scheme, too, suggested a level of sophistication not catered to in lowly grads. It had a curiously untouched atmosphere however, and, as she began to examine a little closer the surfaces and furniture she realised it was all completely new. She guessed that that was supposed to please her but found instead she was a little irked. New things were…distant, in some inarticulable way. That imperialistic quest to conquer the new which drove so many scientists did not, for her, extend to interior design preferences.

The almost total lack of noise began to be a little disconcerting. She supposed the snow muffled things here. It was strange to her, having lived in the middle of cities for so long. She crossed the room, keeping her tread on the hardwood floors as light as possible by removing her heeled shoes, and began to search through the few boxes she had for the one labelled _Musique_. Gingerly, she lifted out of it a smooth-lined and obviously expensive silver stereo-system, which she proceeded to set out on the coffee table in the lounge.

She flipped gently through her music collection and settled on Miles Davis, turning the volume up softly, softly until the rich, low sound swelled through the apartment, warming it somewhat. Delphine dropped elegantly onto the sofa for a while, closing her eyes and fragmentedly humming to herself, a small smile tugging at her lips. She found music was a way to centre herself through all these changes - a constant, in the absence of sustained relationships with other human beings. Home.

Lounging there, she thought of the last new apartment she had had to acclimatise to. It had been a little less untouched, a little less metallic, but still the same coolness. Dyad certainly wasn’t in the business of keeping its employees cosy. There was always something of the lab about a Dyad property, something…sterile she supposed. But then, she had never been a cosy person herself, so perhaps they suited her, these smart, clean rooms. Cosiness only made her perversely uncomfortable, pulling at those same fronds of memory that she tried so very hard not to dwell on, those of a home that felt so alien now.

She’d begged so hard to go to boarding-school and it had been the corner-stone of her success as a scientist, she knew, but sometimes she couldn’t help but wonder if it had been wise. She snorted, sardonic towards her own wistfulness. One did not expect wisdom from a fifteen year old. Not in those circumstances.

Besides, the choice was made. And even if it had not been, even could she choose again, what else was there? She had never really had a choice. There was only survival, sometimes. The rest had to fall into place when it would.

Oh, but jazz always made one so nostalgic, she oughtn’t to let herself get so sentimental every time she went somewhere new. And, after all, here she would meet fellow students and have seminars. Would have no choice, in fact, but to “make friends” as her parents always put it. Which would be good for her. She hadn’t really had such an opportunity since, well, since her masters’ studies, she realised with an unpleasant jolt. Six years since she had had a group of people she might honestly call “friends” rather than associates. It was an awfully long time. And perhaps all the worst because she had never thought of it in all those years. Never realised.

When had she become so apparently indifferent to human relationships? Sometimes her creeping coldness scared even herself.

No use dwelling, however, as she now well knew. She reached out a reluctant but determined arm to the folder on the couch beside her marked “Monitor: 324B21”. Grimace. “Beraud” she mumbled to herself, testing out her assigned new name. She didn’t much like it and had no doubt she’d have a hard time remembering to answer to it. She’d gotten pretty good at lying over the years but this was a whole new level of deception, an entire new persona between her and the world, keeping Delphine Cormier that little bit further out of reach.

Just what she needed.

**Author's Note:**

> Series title taken from T S Eliot's 'Wasteland'; This fic's title from his 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' - guess I was on a bit of a modernist kick! Both are worth a read.


End file.
